On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Richard Clarke wrote: >Could someone point me to documentation for exim and fetchmail which is >easier to understand than the "man" files.
There is more documentation in /usr/doc or /usr/share/doc. It's more comprehensive, but it's probably not that helpfull if you just want to get started. >As I understand, exim is a local mail agent which uses SMTP? to send >mail around the localnetwork. Fetchmail delivers remote mail, POP3 >in my case, to this local network and the users on it. However, I >don't fully understand how it all works yet and my attempt to get >either exim or fetchmail working don't seem to bear any success. If you use the deb packages, exim should work almost out of the box. The postinstall script will ask some questions and find a suitable default config for your system. In particular, you probably want to use your ISP's SMTP server as a so-called "smart host", pay attention to that part. Try exim first by sending mail to yourself on the local machine, that is, say, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In case it doesn't work, install the eximon package and run eximon (as root or sudo'ed), that's a graphical interface to exim that will display the log and the contents of the mail queue. Post again if you run into trouble. Try to get that straight before trying out fetchmail, it would be useless without a working MTA like exim. Then, install exim and create a .fetchmailrc file either for root (in /root, for system-wide setups) or for you only (in your home dir). The syntax is pretty straightforward, for example: poll <servername> # name of the pop server proto pop3 # use pop3 protocoll user <username> # username for pop server password <password> # guess what is <username> # username on *local* host and (optional): fetchall # fetch old and new mail and delete from server And so on for every mail account. .fetchmailrc permissions *have* to be 600 (`chmod 600 .fetchmailrc`). Let's assume you created a system-wide .fetchmailrc in /root and want to poll all servers whenever you connect to your ISP. Put that at the bottom of '/etc/ppp/ip-up': fetchmail -d 600 fetchmail The first line will start fetchmail in daemon mode and tell it to poll all hosts in your .fetchmailrc (/root/.fetchmailrc in this case, since commands in /etc/ppp/ip-up are run as root by default) every 600 seconds. The second line will wake the daemon up and tell it to poll right away (otherwise the first attempt would be made after 600 seconds). Whenever you want to fetch mail in between these intervals, just run `fetchmail` as root, to wake up the daemon process. Don't forget to add this fetchmail --quit to '/etc/ppp/ip.down'. If you don't want/need to run fetchmail as root, the command in /etc/ppp/ip-* should be preceded by a `sudo` command, e.g. sudo <my_local_username> fetchmail -d 600 Let us know what you come up with. -- Space for hire. Contact Philip Lehman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
